Practicing the Basics

It’s September 2013, nine months since my decision to leave a decade-long practice and identity to venture into the great unknown. It’s been far more of an emotional process than I had originally expected. Change is hard.

This past year, I’ve felt more compelled than usual to tell the story of my transition as it unfolds. It’s driven by my belief in the importance of working openly and leaving trails, but there’s something more driving me right now.

I’m lucky enough not to suffer from impostor syndrome. A lot of my amazing friends and colleagues do, and I go back-and-forth as to whether it drives them forward or holds them back. Personally, I’m humbled by the amazing opportunities I’ve had over the years, I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished so far, and I have utter confidence in what I think I can achieve moving forward.

I’ve also failed more than I’ve succeeded. I’ve done my share of failing this past year. I’m wise enough to know that failure is part of the game, but I’m still struggling to deal with the emotional baggage that comes with it.

I want to share what I’ve learned from this process, and I also want others to know that this is normal, that everyone — even the most remarkable people — goes through it. The first rule of Changemaker Bootcamp is to be nice to yourself, but that can be an incredibly difficult rule to follow. Believe me, I know.

If I had to name one thing I’ve learned this past year, it is this: Being principled is easy. Living your principles is hard.

I’ve been trying to live some very basic principles, principles that I’ve advocated for years, principles that I’ve helped others try to live. It’s hard. I’d like to think that I’m better at it than average, but even if that were true, it’s not much consolation. If we were all a bit better at living our principles, the world would be a better place. In going through my own struggles, I’m also trying to create tools and structures that others can use as well. By elevating myself, I hope to elevate others.

One lesson I’m still learning is that focusing on the basics reaps the biggest rewards. In particular, I think the most important, basic practice is to be intentional, but hold it lightly. Simply starting with an intention is really hard, and I don’t know that many people who do it well. I’m placing a lot of emphasis on that for myself, and I hope that in sharing what I learn, I can help others with it as well.

“Failure” Is Part of the Game

One of my favorite work maxims is: If you’re not fucking up, you’re not trying hard enough.

I try to drive this home with all of my teams in all of my projects. But what does it actually mean, and how do you actually create a culture that encourages this?

Baseball offers some beautiful insights into this. In baseball, if you manage to hit the ball successfully 30 percent of the time over the course of your career, you are considered a great hitter, quite possibly a Hall of Famer. That means you’re “failing” 70 percent of the time. But no one thinks of it that way, because hitting a tiny baseball coming at you at 90 miles per hour from 60 feet away is freakin’ hard.

If you’re going to adopt this attitude in your own work, you have to be clear about what a good success rate actually is, and you have to celebrate when you achieve that rate. In Silicon Valley, for example, most VCs are in the high-risk, high-reward business. Many VCs cite a 10 percent hit rate as success. If they hit that rate, they celebrate.

With some of my projects, I go so far as to add, “Failure of effort” to my checklist of success. For example, in my second Changemaker Bootcamp pilot, I had one workout that went horribly awry. I actually checked that off as a success indicator, because it gave me confidence that I was really testing the model rather than playing it safe.

The other important thing to do is to differentiate between different kinds of failure. I like to think of it as failure of neglect versus failure of effort. One of my favorite coaches in baseball always says that he’ll never complain about a player getting thrown out trying to steal, because it’s a failure that stems from effort, not neglect. (Stat geeks object vociferously to this strategy, but that’s a topic for another day.)

With my teams, I try to go out of my way to reward people for failure of effort, because I want to encourage people to follow their instincts and take risks. I’m not always good at this, especially in high-stakes situation.

Last July, we had a terrible Delta Dialogues meeting, which was documented in our final report. There was one moment in particular when one of the facilitators advocated strongly for a particular move that the rest of us did not feel good about. I supported it anyway, because I understood his reasoning and because he felt so strongly about it. The move didn’t work, and he felt awful about it.

In our debrief, I tried to state as clearly as possible that, if I had to do it again, I would do exactly the same thing. We were dealing with a lot of complexity, and we had to make strong moves if we were going to be successful. That meant we were going to make mistakes, and we needed to be okay with mistakes of effort. I wanted my teammate to understand that I supported him and believed in him, and a mistake of effort wasn’t going to change that.

Still, I’m not sure I conveyed that message successfully, because I was absolutely dejected by the overall outcome, and I was probably sending very mixed messages. In particular, I didn’t think we had prepared adequately for the meeting — failures of neglect — and I was very angry about that.

In the end, it all worked out. We were ultimately honest with ourselves about what we controlled and what we didn’t, and we made a lot of adjustments based on what had happened. In a followup meeting two months later, my colleague made the exact same move. This time, it was perfect, and that meeting ended up being the best one of the whole project.

The key to doing anything hard is to strive for perfection, but to expect a certain amount of failure. In practice, this is hard, especially when you’re a high achiever used to a certain level of success. Your ability to embed this mindset into structures (such as your success checklist) will help you do this more effectively, but at the end of the day, it’s all about practice.

Measuring Mindshare

My friend, Jerry Michalski, recently tweeted a question about collaboratively authoring documents using GitHub. I didn’t see his original tweet, but I saw a followup exchange between him and Howard Rheingold, and so I pointed both of them to Ward Cunningham’s Smallest Federated Wiki. I’ve seen some followup exchanges, and I’m happy that the pointer may have triggered something interesting.

I also realized that, despite admiring Ward’s project from afar for years now, I have never blogged or tweeted about it.  I’ve mentioned it to folks, but not to Ward directly, and I even wanted to incorporate it into a client project last year that I didn’t end up doing. I don’t know that Ward knows how interesting or important I think his explorations have been. Hopefully, he does now.

It got me thinking about how hard it is to measure mindshare, especially in this day and age. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in regard to my own work, recently. For the past few years, I haven’t spent much time thinking about who reads this blog or any of my other writings, but every once in a while, I’d get some signal that people are paying attention. Sometimes, it would be from people I knew, who would often allude to something I wrote face-to-face. Other times, it would be from completely random people.

I’m thinking more consciously about mindshare again, partially because I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do next, and I’m being a bit more transparent about it here than I’m probably comfortable. But I’m also doing it because I wonder how much of an impact my thinking and my writing is making in the world.

My numbers tell me that a tiny corner of the universe is paying attention. It’s smaller than when I first started the blog and when I last seriously paid attention to this sort of thing, but it’s still there. Still, it’s hard to really interpret what those numbers mean and what part of the story they’re not reflecting.

With Changemaker Bootcamp, I’ve gotten many more signals, and they’ve surprised, moved, and motivated me. When I started my first pilot five months ago, I posted a call of participants here, not expecting anyone to respond. Not only did a handful of people respond, they included some I hadn’t heard from in a long time, and two people I didn’t know at all, including Anna Castro, who became my first bootcamper.

My “official” launch a few weeks ago triggered more signals. I’ve heard directly from interesting folks I didn’t know before, and I’ve discovered a bunch of new folks from my newsletter signups.

Thinking back to my reflection about Ward, I’m now wondering what kind of mindshare I have beyond the signals I’ve received. I know that much of it is latent and invisible, but knowing that it’s out there is a source of encouragement.

One of the challenges with working online is our lack of literacy around feedback mechanisms. There are actually more feedback mechanisms online than there are face-to-face, but we don’t necessarily understand or pay attention to them. Regardless, it’s important to remember that those feedback mechanisms only tell part of the story, that mindshare is immeasurable, and that it’s important to keep sharing in ways that others can benefit.

It’s also a good reminder that we all have the ability to give feedback without requiring any special tools. It’s so simple, it’s easy to think it’s not important enough to do. That’s too bad. It can be very meaningful, and the world would be a better place if we all took the time to do it more often.

Lessons from June-July 2013 Changemaker Bootcamp

I spent most of last week letting people know about the “official” launch of Changemaker Bootcamp, but I forgot to mention it here on my very own blog! So now you know. Next bootcamp is Tuesdays, 3-5pm, from August 20 through September 24. Application deadline is next Tuesday, August 13, so apply today! And please spread the word.

There’s a new website, and lots of great content, including what I learned from this last pilot. That’s the real reason I’m posting this, and frankly, it’s one of the things I’m enjoying about the whole experience. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been applying the lean methodology aggressively, except that I’m also blogging what I’m learning openly. It’s been a gratifying process, and I hope that others are finding the lessons that I’m sharing valuable.

That’s the point of this whole exercise, after all: For all of us to get better at working together.

Changemaker Obstacles and Help

A few months ago, I asked changemakers to fill out a survey describing their biggest challenges and sources of support. Over 100 people filled out the survey, and almost 80 percent of respondents left their contact information, which allowed me to send some followup questions. Everyone was extremely generous in not only filling out the survey, but in sharing it with others, which helped me get a more diverse pool of respondents.

Here’s my analysis of the responses:

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below! You can also download the anonymized data and do your own analysis. (If you decide to do this and want to help me do pivot tables in Excel correctly, let me know! I had to use all sorts of spreadsheet hacks to find what I was looking for.)

My goal in doing this survey was to listen to as many changemakers as possible and to explore possible ways that I can help empower them further. I don’t have any new ideas yet, but I do feel like I have a better grasp of the obstacles that changemakers face as well as the opportunities to help them. I also felt like the results helped validate my Changemaker Bootcamp experiment and gave me language to help describe it.

Thanks to everyone who filled out the survey, and special thanks to all of you who went out of your way to share it with others. Thanks also to those who took the time to answer some followup questions and to those who reviewed early versions of the survey (partial lists in the deck above).

Finally, many thanks to Amy Luckey, who was invaluable in helping me think through and analyze the survey results!